I like the insight that even easy SEO work ,like on page optimization, can be effective in less competitive markets but those same markets will be competitive and pricey when approached from the PPC side.

Guess it all is a matter of keyword research.

From SEOmoz Rand Fishkin:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Market Forces & SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

For Clients:
If Sales/ROI = Increased Qualified Referrals + Improved Rankings
then:
Authority = Increased Qualified Referrals + Improved Rankings
then it stands to reason that:
Sales/ROI = Authority building = industry knowledge + authority building knowledge

Its really difficult (though not impossible) to have real success without the presence of both elements (industry knowledge and authority building knowledge). Accordingly, it requires a very close relationship between SEO and client, and IT WILL require client involvement. The more client willingness to participate as needed, the better.

photo credit: jaycoxfilm

So, if you find yourself as a client at Stage 1 or 2 and wishing you could secure more low CPA business, consider stepping up your level of activitiy in the SEO process. In the end, content is key, and only you have the necessary knowledge. It does require your involvement though!

I always stress to clients that the more involved they get in the process, the better the results they will see. They always seem willing at the initial sales meetings, but their enthusiasm quickly fades once the project starts. Success takes persistent effort. It is not a lottery game.

Your most valuable asset is your professional reputation and the people who know you. LinkedIn is design to facilitate sharing these factors. LinkedIn is used by executives at all the Fortune 500 and membership is over 16 million. In fact over 200,000 are from the Philadelphia area.

He announced that LinkedIn would be supporting OpenSocial, Google’s free and open source API that will make web widget application portable across other social media sites that support it. This is huge. Here is a video of the announcement at Google.

The latest Nielsen NetRating has LinkedIn growing faster (189%) than FaceBook (125%). So if you are waiting for a engraved invitation this is it. Send me your email and I will invite you in my network[2.3 million].

What is really disturbing is that PPC ads appearing on search engine content networks like Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network was worse. Would you believe 28% up from 19.2 % in 4Q06.

“Click fraud activity continues to grow especially on made-for-ad sites, parked domains and on the content networks,” said Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics.
“Advertisers, publishers and search engines need to take notice because content networks are becoming the fastest growing source of click fraud. Ensuring their quality is essential for the pay-per-click advertising market to continue its growth.”

Can this trend be reversed? Has email spam become less? No. So that doesn’t bode well for click fraud going down anytime soon.

So what is an online marketer to do. Starting implimenting a multiprong approach to natural SEO. Get a specialist to optimize your web site. Then consider creating a companion blog for additional organic search generation. Create the blog on the same domain so they reinforce each other. Weave in Social Neworking also.

Keep expanding the organic approach so you become less dependant on PPC.

Smart marketers always have a Plan B.

Technorati Tags: PCC fraud, Plan B, organic SEO

Here is a video tutorial that explains its use in better detail than I can write. Seeing it done makes learning easy. The Tubetorial series on Word Press tips is excellent. Note especially the section on per post customization; here you can make the title seen by the search engines more keyword focused than the one you might want for the title that humans read.

So what is search engine trust?
For the purpose of keeping things simple, I would identify a site’s trust by 3 different simple criteria:

• Website Age – (most importantly the first time it was indexed)
• Total # of backlinks and the overall age of those links
• Total “trustscore” of other backlinks (How many .edu’s, .gov’s, high ACTUAL PR links, etc.)

Most trust criteria revolve around some dependence on age, which is actually a pretty good signal of quality. From things folks at Google have said in the past, the trustbox (or sandbox if you must) was the unintentional effect of some other filters that were implemented. Realizing that age was a great signal all the way around to defend against the overdependency on links, they’ve went buckwild with age variables ever since.

So this explains why new sites are taking longer to show up in search. Blogs are effected too but not as severely, being very well optimized and by nature putting out fresh content into the index, often daily.

Two or three years ago:
SEO = Content + high PR links

Created: a micro-economy of link buying solely for google rankings

Now
SEO = Crusty trusted domain + content

Will create: use your imagination.

So now an overdependance on trust will create new distortions. Go read the rest of his lengthy post. Its a keeper.

One of the amazing trends I’ve discovered in watching the HitTail discussion on the Internet is how Google Analytics and HitTail so often get invoked in the same breath, such as comments from The-Secret and shopgirl.

While Google analytics is statistics, which gives you the typical top-10 lists, HitTail is on the other hand, based on anecdotal and empirical evidence –working much like a private eye piecing together clues. Recently, I was slammed by a HitTail user accusing us of not really being a longtail tool, because we stop 350 keywords in, and the long tail hardly even starts at that point. I humbly reminded him that the “My HitTail” tab was only one of five –and actually the least-important one at that.

That’s right!

We only made that long tail graph to demonstrate to people how things JUST START TO GET INTERESTING in the tail, and how much attention is improperly spent on the head, where you’re already performing well! So, I added some text to the bottom of the chart to make sure people get the subtle message of how the data displayed in the chart is actually UNIMPORTANT!

The fact that we’re not Web analytics software, applying statistics to the data is what makes people so addicted to HitTail. We’re not insulating you from the data or interpreting it for you. We’re merely zeroing in on serendipitous events that happen to be handing over competitive intelligence. It’s not some derivative of this event that’s important. It’s the event itself–that someone found your site on such-and-such a term, but they worked really hard to find you–usually deep in the results.

This tells you two things:

1. You CAN be found on that term. Hence, the value of identifying the first time anyone ever found your site on a particular term. It demonstrates POTENTIAL–like surveying for new oil fields.
2. There’s a bunch of crap ahead of you in the search results that likely did not satisfy the searcher, or else they would have stopped sooner.

So, merely by virtue of using HitTail, you’re simultaneously surveying for new fields of website traffic “oil”, and you’re verifying that no one already has a strong claim to that property. There’s no waiting for the polar icecaps to melt to claim your Internet gold. You don’t have to battle Russia, Canada, the U.S. and Denmark for North Pole natural resource rights. All you have to do is choose an already-search-optimized publishing platform, such as Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad or WordPress, and take HitTail’s writing suggestions.

It’s that easy.